By using an over-subscription strategy, thin provisioning technology addresses the issue of inefficient storage utilization. Applications are given physical space from a storage pool when data is written to the application, avoiding the pre-allocation commitment required by traditional storage provisioning approaches. In this way, an application can appear to have more storage than is actually reserved for it. As the application’s data grows, it can be given more storage from the storage pool, with minimal management intervention. With thin provisioning, existing capacity can be more efficiently used, eliminating the need for over-provisioning and often delaying the acquisition of additional storage.

Often storage is over-promised and then actually dealt out as needed, making it incumbent upon the Storage Administrator to monitor storage usage so that an application’s write requests can be fulfilled without failures.

StorageConsole provides the following key capacity-at-risk reports to facilitate this monitoring process: